Louise Despont’s drawings open a space that is both ancient and contemporary. Since discovering the potential of working with pencil and architectural stencils on paper, Despont (b. 1983 in New York) has adopted an intuitive process in which she allows her drawings to develop as she creates them, resulting in an almost devotional object comprised of dense colors and shapes. Preferring to draw on ledger paper with preexisting lines, Despont sees a parallel between the mathematical accounting the paper was designed to organize and the way that her practice is an accounting of her time spent. Even when Despont creates large-scale installations, her practice remains personally labor intensive. Having collected images for many years, she complements her broad visual references with her interest in energy and spirituality. She draws inspiration from a breadth of subjects including Emma Kunz’s pendulum drawings, Indian tantric art, miniatures and mandalas, Tibetan medical texts, Indonesian textiles and the healing arts of homeopathy. She is very drawn to images that trace the movement of energy or attempt to represent the invisible in order to act as a battery, or perhaps even a remedy.
